Happy New Year Jolla fans and followers!

2017 was an important and successful year in the journey of Sailfish OS. As introduced originally in 2015 we changed our strategy towards the marketplace and gradually moved our focus towards the B2B (business-to-business) sector in order to expand Sailfish OS with regional licensing partners. This year, we started to harvest the results of this change in the strategy, by making new licensing deals to the big market of China and to the emerging markets of Latin Americas together with our partner Jalasoft. In parallel the business in Russia together with our licensing partner Open Mobile Platfrom is progressing well, first licensed Sailfish products started the sales this summer and together we expect together to roll out a sizable number of various Sailfish devices to the Russian market during 2018. Moreover, as a major milestone, we increased the general availability of Sailfish OS for the world by announcing Sailfish X, the downloadable and fully supported Sailfish OS.

Sailfish X

We launched Sailfish OS as a fully downloadable solution called Sailfish X for Sony Xperia products in collaboration together with Sony Open Devices Program. The first implementation was completed for Sony Xperia X during the year, very much thanks to the active Sailfish hardware porting community, and we started to officially offer it in October.

The Sailfish X program has been an important and engaging activity for us to work together with our community, and to be able to offer Sailfish OS to whole new frontiers which we have not previously been able to serve. The amount of downloads and new customers already within the current supported markets (EU, Norway & Switzerland) has been a very positive surprise for us. We are very happy to see many new Sailfish users!

Due to the success of the program, we will be adding support for new product models and markets at a steady pace during 2018. We’re seeing new demand coming from developing markets in Asian and Latin American countries, and in India, and in these markets support for dual SIM is very important. While we’re already working on to support a next generation device, we will also add support the for the Xperia X Dual SIM model (aka “F5122“) in order to enable new markets in various countries during Q1 2018. Adding new markets will also come together with the support of a graphical installer, in order to lower the entry barrier for new customers to start enjoy Sailfish OS.

Further, there’s been some interest to support the more pocket-able version of Xperia X, the Xperia X Compact. As we’re working already on two other new devices (the dual SIM and the to-be-announced), we don’t yet have the necessary business case to commit more resources ourselves to finish up the Xperia X Compact full solution. However, this is something we’re openly looking at: if the community adaptation will be good enough in the near future, we look for alternatives to start support it. We’ll come back to this as it develops.

Looking forward to 2018

I believe blockchain and cryptocurrencies have been topical discussion topics over many Christmas dinners. Earlier this year we started a collaboration together with Zipper Global Ltd. in order to offer blockchain technologies for Sailfish OS. In this collaboration, Jolla is offering Sailfish X as a core development environment, and Zipper develops and offers the blockchain platform on top. We’re happy to see Zipper has already exceeded its minimum financing and we’re excited about the upcoming year of collaboration together.

2018 will be an important year for Jolla as a company, and to expand Sailfish OS. We expect to see the first Sailfish products enter the market from our China licensing partner. These are something totally new: disrupting products not seen anywhere before. The business in Latin American markets will be in full execution during 2018, and we’re looking to see new partners announced in new countries.

Sailfish is here to stay, and we are working hard with our new partners and with our community around the world in order to bring Sailfish OS to the masses and build ecosystems around it. Thank you all for your continued support and passion, and let’s wish all the best of success for Sailfish for 2018!